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Report Says Acclaimed Czech Writer Informed on a Supposed Spy

In a revelation that could tarnish the legacy of one of the best-known Eastern European writers, a Czech research institute published a report on Monday indicating that the young Milan Kundera told the police about a supposed spy.

According to the state-backed Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes, in 1950, long before he became famous for darkly comic novels like “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” and “The Joke,” Mr. Kundera, who was then 21, told the local police about a guest in a student dormitory where he lived.

The police quickly arrested the man, Miroslav Dvoracek, who had defected to Germany in 1948 and was said to have been recruited by United States-backed anti-Communists as a spy against the Czech government. He was sentenced to 22 years in prison. Mr. Dvoracek narrowly escaped the death penalty, a common punishment for espionage, and eventually served a 14-year sentence, including hard labor in a uranium mine.

The allegations could diminish Mr. Kundera’s moral stature as a spokesman, however enigmatic, against totalitarianism’s corrosion of daily life.

In a rare interview on Monday with the Czech CTK news agency, Mr. Kundera also accused the news media of committing “the assassination of an author.”

The story is the most dramatic recent episode in Eastern Europe’s fitful reckoning with its Communist past, an era that Czechs, with their soft Velvet Revolution against the Soviet system, have been loath to explore deeply.

The report about Mr. Kundera also recalls the case of the German writer Günter Grass, a Nobel laureate, who disclosed in 2006 that he had been a volunteer in the Waffen-SS as a teenager during World War II.

The report also speaks to Mr. Kundera’s vexed relationship with his former homeland. He was a staunch member of the Communist Party until the Soviet invasion in 1968, when he was fired from his teaching post and his work was banned. Expelled from the party in 1970, he emigrated to France in 1975 and has lived there ever since, taking French citizenship. He is respected but not loved in the Czech Republic, where many of his recent books, written in French, have not been translated.

In the interview with the Czech news agency, Mr. Kundera said: “My memory has not tricked me. I did not work for the secret police.”

Yet the institute’s claims do not link him to the secret police. Instead, with its combination of specificity and mystery, a local police report from the time reads like something out of Mr. Kundera’s writing.

Dated March 14, 1950, during the Stalinist terror, it states that “Milan Kundera, student, born on 1 April 1929 in Brno, resident at the Prague VII student hall of residence,” went to the local police at 4 p.m. and made a statement about Iva Militka, another student from the residence.

According to the report, Mr. Kundera learned that Ms. Militka had told a fellow student that she met Mr. Dvoracek, who said he had deserted Czech military service and fled to Germany. He asked her to hold a briefcase “for safekeeping.” Informed by Mr. Kundera about the briefcase, police officers waited for Mr. Dvoracek to return, found that he had a false identity document and arrested him.

The suitcase contained “two hats, two pairs of gloves, two pairs of sunglasses and a tube of cream.”

The claims emerged only now, more than 50 years after the arrest, when a researcher for the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes stumbled onto the police report “by accident” earlier this year, said Vojtech Ripka, the director of the institute’s documentation unit. The institute, which opened in February, was created by the government to research the country’s Communist and Nazi past.

The researcher, Adam Hradilek, was investigating cases like that of Mr. Dvoracek’s: Czechs who fled to Germany in 1948 after the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia established a one-party system, and then returned to spy on the Prague government.

Mr. Hradilek and a co-author, Peter Tresnak, published their findings on Monday in Respekt, a Czech political weekly magazine. Martin Simecka, the editor in chief of Respekt, said he had no reason to doubt the authenticity of the police report.

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Mr. Simecka said that if the Czech authorities had known about the document in the 1970s, they might have used it against Mr. Kundera.

For his part, Mr. Dvoracek suffered a stroke in June and can no longer speak, his wife, Marketa Dvoracek Novak, said in a telephone interview from the couple’s home in Sweden, where they have lived since Mr. Dvoracek’s release from prison in 1964.

She said Mr. Hradilek last week showed her a copy of the police report naming Mr. Kundera, and she had shown it to her husband. “Yes, he understood it, but it didn’t make much difference,” she said. “He just waved his hand. After a whole life, it doesn’t matter. It’s too late.”

She said her husband did not care who had turned him in. “It doesn’t really matter to him whether it was some very famous bad guy who was the informant, or someone who was not famous at all,” she said.

Nor did she expect an apology or explanation from Mr. Kundera. “No, no, no — that is irrelevant,” she said. “To apologize after 58 years? No.”

Mr. Ripka, of the institute, said he was disappointed Mr. Kundera had not responded more fully.

“We regret that he doesn’t speak more specifically about the case, because he definitely knows more information,” Mr. Ripka said. He denied Mr. Kundera’s claim that the institute had unjustly singled out the author. “We really don’t search archives for attractive information for the media,” he said.

Roberto Calasso, a close friend of Mr. Kundera’s who is the director of Mr. Kundera’s Italian publisher, Adelphi, said the claims stemmed from “a strong acrimony that his country has for him.”

Some others saw the report in a different light.

“I would say this would not be out of character for Kundera or anyone who was so young and so dedicated to the Communist cause,” said Michael Kraus, a Prague native and professor at Middlebury College in Vermont, who served on the advisory board that helped establish the research institute.

Although Mr. Kundera’s views later evolved, Mr. Kraus said, back then he was “a true believer.”

“If in fact this is what he did,” Mr. Kraus added, “he was just simply doing his patriotic duty, as he saw it.”

In an interview published in The New York Times in 1985, Mr. Kundera discussed his belief in privacy.

“We live in an age when private life is being destroyed,” he said. “The police destroy it in Communist countries, journalists threaten it in democratic countries, and little by little the people themselves lose their taste for private life and their sense of it,” he said then.

“Without secrecy,” he added, “nothing is possible — not love, not friendship.”

Correction: October 21, 2008

An article last Tuesday about a Czech research institute’s report indicating that Milan Kundera, one of Eastern Europe’s best-known writers, had been a secret-police informer as a student in 1950 misstated the date that Miroslav Dvoracek, a man who served a 14-year prison term on spying charges, was told about Mr. Kundera’s possible role in his arrest. It was in early October, not June.

Correction: November 6, 2008

An article on Oct. 14 about accusations that the Czech novelist Milan Kundera may have been an informer on a suspected anti-communist spy in 1950 misstated the Communist Party’s rise to power in Czechoslovakia in 1948. It forced non-communists out of the government and established a one-party system; there was no “communist invasion” of the country.

Walter Gibbs contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A6 of the New York edition with the headline: Report Says That as Young Man, Czech Writer Informed on a Supposed Spy. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe